Odd ravings, comments, and other wastes of time.
Some are in plain prose, yet others are in rhyme.

26 January 2008

The biggest jailbreak in history

The biggest jailbreak in historyJohn Maxwell

On Tuesday, January 29, it will be exactly six months since I established a folder on my computer titled “The Crash of 2007”.Tuesday January 29 will also be the 56th anniversary of my entry into what I thought was the honourable profession of journalism. These days many journalists ask themselves whether what they practice is a profession; whether what they do is honourable and even whether it constitutes journalism.As disaster approaches we wonder why the global media don’t seem to notice.As the so-called Thatcherite-Reaganite revolution cartwheels its ungainly, calamitous and soul-destroying progress towards implosion and self-destruction, many of us are too mesmerised by the gargantuan awfulness of it all to look at anything but the accompanying economic and financial mayhem.But there is lots more not so obvious.In Iraq at this moment, the major evidence of humanity’s eight millennia of civilisation is being looted and sold off to ‘investors’ who have more faith in the artefacts of Nebuchednezzar’s peasants than in all the oil wells of George Bush. As well they might. As we sang in the late sixties: “Everything Crash !”.As Field Marshal (ret’d) Rumsfeld will tell you again, “Stuff happens!”Move on! Get over it!What is happening is so enormous, so transcendental that we can no more see it than we can see the rotation of the Earth.But there are many people, neither prophets nor even experts, who for a long time have been feeling in their bones that something untoward is underway, rather as they say cats and dogs can sense seismic disturbances before earthquakes shake us up and destroy our cosy domesticity and, often our lives. Even people like me, who thought they were feeling the precursor tremors, are probably just as scared and apprehensive as anyone else. Worse yet, while we can vividly imagine what may happen, most people don’t get really frightened until their own houses start to to do the tango.I’ve been watching for a long time as the invisible hand of capitalism attempted even more daring feats of prestidigitation; as the managers seized control from the shareholders and the corporate system abandoned any idea of public responsibility or accountability, as jobs and the people in them, were ruthlessly discarded and production was outsourced to slave societies – oops- ‘more cost effective countries’ – and the American capitalist forgot what the trade unions had been trying to tell them before they were emasculated: The money paid to American workers is what fuels American production. But the Enrons and the Exxons have never been interested. The idea was to make as much money as possible as fast as possible and to hell with the workers.A declining workforce still being paid at the equivalent of 1975 wages could obviously not support the enormous superstructure of speculation, competitive consumption, greed and waste into which American capitalism has transformed itself. If the workers couldn’t afford to support the economy out of their wages or savings, their masters could always borrow European or Japanese or Chinese money to lend the workers and allow them to borrow more, paying ever higher rates of interest, running faster on the treadmill and losing ground, and the whole elaborate Ponzi scheme would go on and on until the second coming of Ayn Rand.Multi billionaires like George Soros who spoke of ‘gangster capitalism’ and Warren Buffet, who spoke of the unfairness of the system were ignored: perhaps they were just envious of how fast the new Lords of the Earth could make money and didn’t really understand modern capitalismWhat American capitalism has accomplished would have confounded Adam Smith and astonished even Karl Marx: it destroyed its own working class.For the new-rich, capitalism was a no-risk game where governments had a duty to come to the rescue of those involved in unfortunate accidents, like Enron or the sub-prime mortgage debacle. Mr Alan Greenspan who keeps Ayn Rand at his bedside, had always delivered when necessary, despite a schoolmasterish tendency to vaguely deplore the ‘animal spirits’ and other juvenile delinquencies of his billionaire charges.The problem of course, was that there were too many balls in the air and little or no certitude about how many capitalists could dance on the head of a peon. Ayn Rand, from beyond the grave, advised self-love and selfishness as the only virtues..Margaret Thatcher did say ‘There is no such thing as Society” – expressing the Rand philosophy even more succinctly than Miss Rand herself. This pithy aphorism was then swallowed by various dummies all over the world. In the United States the explicit application of that principle has wiped out a significant proportion of the savings accumulated by African Americans over the last 50 years or so. And though it is blacks who are most critically affected, whites, Hispanics, and what is left of the working class are all condemned to fulfil the bizarre prediction in the gospel according to Matthew:“For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath”. I’ve always considered that verse to perfectly represent capitalism.The legacy of the Thatcherite-Reaganite counter revolution is not simply economic and social catastrophe but structural unsustainability in every dimensionThough the Reagan/Thatchers did not believe in society their commonplace lunacies such as the deregulation of aviation and Reagan's firing air traffic controllers – worked because of human altruism and the self-sacrifice of the victimised. They privatisated essential services – disregarding the fact that they would be run by the same people. According to them these people would suddenly become more efficient, since there was a profit involved. They ignored the probability of corruption, corner cutting, destruction of social cap[ital and decreases in the indices of civilised existence.Thatcher and Reagan were not the causes of global warming or of any of the dire curses that attend us; they simply made it much harder for us to act quickly effectively and responsibly. The practical, pragmatic guys who ‘make things happen’ too often produce developments that depend on destroying the environment. maximising their profits and stealing environmental goods from the rest of us.We’ve lost the 21 square miles of Kingston Harbour to sewage, solid waste, to assorted manufacturers and to the Port AuthorityDo you hear any of them offering to replace what they have stolen?Of course, when the beach sand goes and when the jellyfish swarm the beaches stinging and scaring our visitors, guess who will be asked to find the money to fix the problems?